Quality assurance control has long been a vexing issue in the development of software applications and web service applications in particular. Applications are often rushed to market in order to take advantage of competitive circumstances, and end users often inevitably perform final testing to discover problems. Often these problems can be addressed in final or additional versions of the applications but commonly at the expense of lost time, lost revenue, or damaged reputation. Web service applications present particularly difficult issues for quality assurance because development often occurs under extreme time pressures for compatibility with many platforms. The task becomes more complex as web service infrastructures grow and controls become more complex and customized.
Many developers concerned with quality prefer to subject applications to rigorous testing before the applications are deployed. Improvements in many web services often do not have the luxury of time to perform alpha and beta testing with limited groups of selected users. Web services are often deployed after functional and regression testing performed with a combination of automatic and manual testing. Software testing can be used to address many of the quality issues, but can provide bottlenecks in application development if the tests are inefficient, difficult to implement, or not intuitive for even novice testers. Some developers may even forgo software testing altogether for these reasons.